Dinner Club, the Personalized Dining Discovery App, Launches
Online, July 24, 2012 (Newswire.com) - Discovereez announced today that its personal restaurant discovery app Dinner Club is available in the App Store for use on both the iPhone and iPod touch. This app changes how people get dining recommendations by taking into account individual or group taste profiles to create personalized short lists.
Dinner Club does not aim to replace review sites like Yelp, but rather provide a personalized and filtered list of recommendations based on location and cuisine type for each user. Says Co-founder and CEO Leigh Goldstein, "Trying to pick a sushi restaurant in San Francisco that you'll like is hard since a site like Yelp has more than 190 listed with more than 1/3 of those having an average rating of 4 stars or higher. The problem is that you have to read the many reviews by other users to determine if you're similar to them and thus will like the restaurant they've reviewed. Dinner Club does that work for you. It compares your ratings to those of its other raters to give you a much shorter, filtered and personalized list of restaurants based on your taste."
Dinner Club takes users' inputs to make best suggestions. The app's engine compares your ratings to those of everyone else in the system to give you personalized recommendations along with a predicted rating you would likely give each restaurant. It also can do this for you and a group of Facebook friends with its Group Recos feature. The recommendation engine is based on tailored filtering algorithms and related techniques. Discovereez has found this approach to be much more accurate than predictions based simply on collaborative filtering or on the user preferences derived from Facebook profiles. "Knowing what tv shows a person likes may give a clue about their restaurant tastes but is a very weak signal relative to explicit ratings on a 10-point scale of restaurants where they've eaten," said CTO Bill Storage. "Doing this for groups of up to six people is tricky from a data perspective, but we've done a lot of work to ensure that the engine makes great group recommendations."
Your Dinner Club taste profile is created once you have rated at least 10 restaurants on a ½ to 5 star scale. Your taste profile, based on whatever you value in a dining experience...the food quality, atmosphere, value, service and other intangibles, ultimately yields tailored recommendations. Dinner Club has simplified the rating experience to encourage users to keep rating restaurants to improve and enhance their overall recommendations; the more you rate, the more complete your profile and accurate the recommendations. Beta testers found the ½-star scale to be a great improvement over other sites' and apps' 1-5 whole digit scale and Discovereez found it makes the personalized predictions much more accurate.
Dinner Club is designed for the discerning diner. Discovereez has found that Dinner Club works best for the following types of users:
The "foodie" - known for their discerning taste and tendency to be the first to try the newest restaurants.
The "urban explorer" - loves to discover new places in different neighborhoods and cities.
The "organizer" - needs to figure out how to accommodate many different peoples' tastes.
Discovereez was founded in 2010 by Goldstein, an ex-eBay and StubHub executive. Storage, an experienced Silicon Valley CTO, joined shortly after to help develop the platform and algorithms. The company also has an app developer and designer and has been self-funded. When asked if Discovereez would expand into other categories, Goldstein replied, "Our main focus now is to continue working on Dinner Club and making it the best personalized dining search experience possible before addressing other categories. In the future, we might explore very similar categories such as bars and would build on our understanding of predicting users' top experiences."
Download Dinner Club at: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dinner-club/id473390650?ls=1&mt=8
For more information contact:
Leigh Goldstein
Founder/CEO
leigh@discovereez.com